The Children at Obama’s Gun Speech

Obama’s gun speech today ended with an action sequence, and the opening scene in a fight. “Let’s sign these orders,” he said, and then, the official transcript notes, like the stage directions in a play, “The executive orders are signed.” There were twenty-three of them, some just notes to remind gun-store owners about the law, others mandating action on information-sharing or gathering. (Also, No. 11: “Nominate an ATF Director.”) The biggest items, universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban, will still depend on a Congress that appeared, in Obama’s speech, as the punch line in a joke. He gestured to Julia Stokes, who’d written to urge him to do something about gun violence, and who, with three others, was there for the speech, and said,

In the letter that Julia wrote me, she said, “I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.”

There, the note in the transcript is “laughter.”

Earlier today, I wrote over at Daily Comment about the N.R.A.’s ugly ad attacking Obama’s gun policies by encouraging resentment of Sasha and Malia—the idea, if it could be called that, was that they get to have guns protecting them and other people don’t. Some commentators wondered if Obama was playing the same game by having the children there. He wasn’t. No one is holding Julia Stokes and the other three correspondents—Grant Fritz, Hinna Zeejah, and Teja Goode—up for derision, or offering them as objects of envy. Instead, they were being treated as political actors, as petitioners of their President and their government—and also as witnesses. Obama quoted from their letters. (Hinna: “I love my country and [I] want everybody to be happy and safe”; Grant: “I think there should be some changes. We should learn from what happened at Sandy Hook I feel really bad.”) “These are our kids. This is what they’re thinking about,” Obama said. “This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged. And their voices should compel us to change.”

As a rhetorical device, “the children” have a checkered past: their theoretical innocence and vulnerability are regularly evoked in arguments against everything from bad words in music and school desegregation to gay marriage and the right to habeas corpus—even if, in each of those cases, the real children, the ones who are growing and learning how to be members of a democracy, are not particularly well served by the shrill arguments made on their behalf. But those attempts stir passions precisely because the currency they are counterfeiting is so valuable. Asking what this country’s children need is the same as asking what kind of country we want to have. (Any congressman who cuts Medicaid should have the image of an injured child by it in front of him.) What Obama did well was to not only treat children as political trinkets but talk about why our obligation was to keep them safe is not only an individual one: they have to be given “the tools they need to grow up and do everything that they’re capable of doing—not just to pursue their own dreams, but to help build this country.”

Obama also spoke about another girl, one who is dead. Her name was Grace McDonnell, and she was murdered in her school in Newtown. John Cassidy writes, correctly, that she was Obama’s most powerful ally in the speech: her parents, who took part in the deliberations led by Vice-President Biden, gave Obama a picture she painted, which is now hanging in his private study. She wanted to be an artist. The best part of that story is that it is not simply a picture of an adorable little girl but the work of her hands, and a reminder of her ambition. It is enough to make a President ambitious, too.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.